The more violence, the less revolution

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"The Storming of the Bastille," Jean-Pierre Houël (1735-1813).

In the discussion within the Occupy movement on whether violence is necessary for making change in the United States, the debate has so far conflated three of the movement’s possible goals. Are we talking about using violence to produce regime change? Or do we really mean “regime change with democratic institutions following the change”? Or is what we really mean “regime change followed by democracy in which the 1 percent lose their grip on power”?

Movements have sometimes produced regime change with no real democracy and the same 1 percent still in charge. The American Revolution did that: King George was booted out and the resulting government, to its credit highly innovative, was still not a democracy for women, the enslaved, and working class people. A couple of centuries later, the 1 percent are still running the United States. A number of other anti-colonial struggles had a similar result.

Many regimes are so oppressive that people will give their lives to change them, even without guarantees that the new regime will be a whole lot better. But as we consider what we want out of our sacrifices to the cause, we should ask: What’s the track record of movements that depend on violence to overthrow their regimes?

The good news is that regimes can be overthrown, even though dictators bring out the police and army to try to stay in power. The bad news is that the people didn’t always win; when they used violence they won only one time in four. They did, however, double their chances of success when they used a nonviolent strategy.

In our research for the Global Nonviolent Action Database, my students and I found a number of cases in which movements first tried violence, found it didn’t work, and then switched over to nonviolent struggle and won.

Researcher Anthony Phalen tells us, for example, that the Latvians tried guerrilla war against domination by the Soviet Union for years without success, then switched to a nonviolent strategy and succeeded.

In El Salvador, the military dictatorship of Hernandez Martinez had been in power for ten years and in 1944 was still strong enough to defeat a military revolt. Researcher Aden Tedla writes that university students then decided to try nonviolent struggle, even making a special point of the nonviolence, calling their campaign huelga de brazos caídos (strike with arms at your sides). The students catalyzed a massive insurgency, and won.

In the early 1970s, the United States got worried about Chile’s democratically-elected government led by left-leaning Salvador Allende. By 1973 the CIA joined the Chilean military to throw Allende out and install General Augusto Pinochet in his place. An armed struggle then developed against Pinochet’s military dictatorship, but it was unable to expel him. Researchers Shandra Bernath-Plaistad and Max Rennebohm describe what worked: a nonviolent people’s struggle succeeded in ousting Pinochet in 1988. The movement succeeded even though Pinochet used the existence of the Chilean armed struggle as a justification to use violence against the nonviolent campaign.

It says a lot about people’s flexibility that, even after losing lives in a violent struggle for change, they can be pragmatic and switch to something that works better. There is more and more evidence that, other things being equal, nonviolent action is more powerful than violent action.

In Serbia in 2000, the young people of Otpor! overthrew dictator Milosevic nonviolently, but failed to establish a solid democracy. Egyptians are working on that same problem right now, tackling a military that seems to want to be the new Mubarak.

Perhaps this problem can be solved with violence. Maybe movements forcing regime change using violent means are only half as effective as nonviolent ones, but what if they make up for their deficiencies by increasing the likelihood that, when violent movements win, democracy more often follows the change? In fact, Chenoweth and Stephan found the opposite.

They found it much more likely that nonviolent campaigns would lead to democratic societies after the regime was forced out. They also found that those societies where movements used nonviolent action were less likely to end up in civil war.

I interviewed South Koreans about their 1986–87 nonviolent campaign to overthrow the dictatorship of Chun Doo Hwan, who was one of a series of dictators backed by the U.S. government. For the first three years of that decade, the government tried to “cleanse” the society of activists, purging or arresting thousands of professors, teachers, pastors, journalists and students. That wave of repression so aroused public hostility that Chun Doo Hwan felt forced to remove military police from campuses and pardon political prisoners.

Instead of restricting themselves to complaints that the government was making only small changes, the movement took advantage of its opportunity. Labor unions created a pro-democracy alliance and students organized themselves nationally. Action built on action, bringing in churches, farmers and civil society groups. Participation in mass rallies rose to 700,000.

The threatened government once again tried a wave of repression, including torture. When word got out that a student was tortured to death, ordinary Koreans joined the radical opposition and momentum increased. Hunger strikes followed and even more massive demonstrations. After a student hit by tear gas bomb fragments died, a million people marched—including middle-class elements who had held back before then.

People power put South Korea solidly on the road to democracy, reflected in 1997 when an opposition candidate, Kim Dae Jung, became president for the first time in Korean history.

South Korea, however, is one of the many examples of regime change in which democratic institutions replaced dictatorship but the same 1 percent continued to hold power. Decades of experiences like that in the 19th and 20th centuries, in which countries liberalized their governance under the pressure of largely nonviolent social movements while the 1 percent hung on to dominance, encouraged communist vanguards to assert that they had the solution to the problem of the super-rich.

A number of the movements that followed the Leninist path of armed struggle in the Soviet Union did indeed eliminate the power of the 1 percent in their countries. However, they didn’t establish democracy. In fact, their improved efficiency as authoritarians over the previous regimes often shrank the already-small space for individual freedom. There were sexual minorities, for example, who under the new regime looked back with nostalgia to the “good old days” of dictatorships that largely left them alone.

Actually, I can’t think of any countries where movements successfully

used violence to get regime change

and established democracy afterward

and curbed the dominant power of the 1 percent.

The only movements that established democracy and curbed the dominant power of the 1 percent were those that used nonviolent revolution to overthrow the governing power. I’ve so far written about two: Norway and Sweden. Both countries are works in progress; there are visionary Norwegians and Swedes who would like them to go farther in refining democracy and reducing the power of their economic elites, though to a U.S. activist they have already gone a long way beyond us. (Free higher education, anyone?)

Bottom line: for those around the world who are committed to change and are considering violence as the way to get it, a track record is still a track record. Movements relying on violence were only half as likely as nonviolent movements to win a new regime, and even then didn’t do as well as their nonviolent cousins in establishing democracy in the new society. There’s no reason to link “violence” with that fine word “radical”—especially if by radical you mean democratic and egalitarian. Yes, violence has accomplished a lot of change in the world, but its track record is mediocre when it comes to the goals of the Occupy movement.

When he wrote The Conquest of Violence in the 1930s, Bart de Ligt didn’t have the data amassed by Chenoweth and Stephan, or the GNAD’s student researchers at Swarthmore, Georgetown and Tufts. But that Dutch revolutionary still got it right when we wrote, “The more violence, the less revolution.”

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George Lakey has been active in direct action campaigns for six decades. Recently retired from Swarthmore College, he has facilitated 1,500 workshops on five continents and led activist projects on local, national and international levels -- most recently with Earth Quaker Action Team. Among many other books and articles, he is author of “Strategizing for a Living Revolution” in David Solnit’s book Globalize Liberation (City Lights, 2004). His 2016 book is "Viking Economics," and in December 2018 Melville House will release "How We Win: A Guide to Nonviolent Direct Action Campaigning."

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25 comments

It’s striking that the nonviolence community is virtually the only place connected with the Occupy Movement where the “necessity” of violence continues to be discussed.

The Occupy Movement is by nature an organic, evolutionary, international nonviolent resistance campaign. There is no sign whatever that it is becoming or can become a violent resistance campaign as described and defined by Chenoweth and Stephan. A thrown object, even a broken window, does not change the nature of the movement.

Perhaps Lakey and others can explain who in this country — apart from the rightist insurrectionists and militias that never seem to be entirely curbed — is advocating or conducting a violent resistance campaign.

In a number of cases around the world today, there are plenty of advocates for violent resistance — beginning with Syria — and their words are reported and absorbed by Americans as well as millions elsewhere. In most cases where advocates of violence are given a hearing, the evidence for its ineffectiveness can be helpful in activating support for the alternative, i.e. the use of civil disobedience, boycotts, strikes and other civilian actions that can drive up the cost of injustice or oppression. Also powerful is the testimony of individuals who’ve engaged in armed struggle, for example, against the apartheid state in South Africa or against Marcos in the Philippines, and who later recanted and admitted that nonviolent tactics had been decisive. I’ve seen audiences visibly swayed by their stories.

This an argument that is by no means settled, even in the U.S., as any of those of us who teach nonviolent action realize. When I used to do talk radio, it was impossible to get through ten minutes of calls without at least one caller angrily disputing that violent resistance might be less effective, typically citing the American Revolution as the example — even though colonists’ resistance to the British began with the refusal to pay taxes and other forms of civilian defiance and became military only after the British landed expeditionary forces in great numbers.

Such a caller would usually be followed at some point by a caller on the radical left who somehow thought that the very discussion of the possible superiority of nonviolent insurrection was somehow a suspicious attack on the right of the people to engage in violent revolt, as if St. Marx and St. Lenin had been sacrireligiously challenged.

Defenders of violence can be found across the ideological spectrum, and Mr. Lakey’s reasoning and evidence is very relevant in answering them.

I would ask you — and Mr. Lakey — to think about what that has to do with Occupy.

Mr. Lakey starts his consideration with the following statement:

“In the discussion within the Occupy movement on whether violence is necessary for making change in the United States…” and he then goes into a long discussion about the successes of nonviolent resistance campaigns and the inadvisability of conducting a violent resistance campaign, as if that were the debate going on within the Occupy movement.

I question the premise. So far as I can tell, there has never been any serious consideration of the “necessity” of violence to accomplish change, nor has there been any serious advocacy of and certainly never any engagement in violent resistance within the Occupy movement. It is only within parts of the nonviolence community that the topic even comes up. People involved in the Occupy movement do not and have not engaged in serious consideration of conducting a violent resistance campaign, at least not that I’m aware of.

Armed insurrection, use of or threat of deadly force, and engaging in other forms of violent resistance are not part of the nature of the Occupy movement. So the continued attempts to focus on the “debate” in Occupy as if it were a debate over whether or not to engage in a violent resistance campaign is disturbing.

The effort to conflate rare and autonomous acts of vandalism and throwing things with violent resistance reaches levels that have no connection at all with reality of Occupy.

To repeat: “The Occupy Movement is by nature an organic, evolutionary, international nonviolent resistance campaign. There is no sign whatever that it is becoming or can become a violent resistance campaign as described and defined by Chenoweth and Stephan. A thrown object, even a broken window, does not change the nature of the movement.”

It would be gratifying for the nonviolence community to recognize that the Occupy movement is not engaged in a violent resistance campaign anywhere in the United States or internationally nor is it ever likely to do so.

The issue of whether or not the use of violence to respond to the violence of the police has come up in several Occupy Movement General Assemblies from the e-mails, blog posts, and alternative media coverage of these events. Some resolutions called for flexibility in responding to crack downs with a broad range of flexible responses.

Nonviolent discipline is critical for success. The state will deliberately and intentionally send “agent provocateurs” to justify the violent crack down. They will use these undercover agents to provoke fights, discord and disruption. It is divide and conquer. There is no guarantee any method violent or non violent will work. Both methods involve sacrifice and suffering. I am sick and tired of old and new radicals dismissing nonviolent direct action as ineffective and “petite bourgeois deviation” and being “passive” and not “active” or “resistive’. This glorification of violence is not revolutionary. What the Tunisians and the Egyptians are doing is true nonviolent revolution. And that is truly revolutionary. And I would argue, more effective and with better results than armed struggle. No government or tyrant can continue in power without the willful consent of the governed to carry out his or her orders. If the police, military and the civilian infrastructure refuse to obey the dictator, he or she has no power.

Understand what you are saying, non-the-less it is vitally important to continue to discuss nonviolence and to build the assurance that it is indeed the most effective path. One of the reasons being, is that adopting a path of nonviolent revolution is not easy, people will get hurt, tortured, killed. We are facing a power elitte that has no intention of giving up power and as the resistance increases so will the violence of state repression. Violence is their ultimate weapon of control especially when the lies begin to be exposed. It takes a lot of courage, commitment and either the acquired (learned) or instinctive knowledge that nonviolence it is a more effective tactic than violence. That the sacrifice we make will not be in vain. What Lakey and others are doing in large part is very valuable preaching to the choir, which in turn is strengthening the choir to be able to withstand the intensity of the struggle. These essential articles are not so much to counter any pro-violent tactics arguments, they are to give us strength and commitment to nonviolent strategy for the difficult task ahead. Keep preaching George.

Valuable information. Agree with Tarak a great deal here. I especially understand the fact that many may die for this vision of change we hold. The elites will not give up easily. It is hearts/minds which can be changed with loving actions. Peace

Happy International Women’s Day! March 8
We generally think of those “heroic” traits which enable people to respond with dramatic action in the face of injustice as masculine. I’m thankful for the growing awareness that the birthing of peace is not a matter of everyone falling into line behind heroic leadership. Peacebuilding depends on fully incorporating feminine traits: radical love, generosity, fairness, unity consciousness. It depends on all-inclusive individual growth: all men, women and children participating in the evolution of the One Life.

Thanks for this comment. I’m concerned, though, that peacemaking qualities not be the preserve of the feminine, nor the antithesis of the masculine—if indeed we want to accept that there is a masculine and feminine as such. No small segment of those opposing the discourse of nonviolence in OWS, for instance (as my recent interview with two of them suggests), comes from female-assigned people who are demanding the right to be seen as something other than essentially nurturing and passive, etc.—to have recognized their anger and capacity for violence.

This is excellent, and echoes the Karatnycky/Ackerman study on the strategic use of nonviolence I quoted in Counterpower, aswell as studies I have done triangulating this with democracy struggles in Sub Saharan Africa between 1989 and 1994.

Quick question – when I’ve been studying this I’ve been defining ‘violent’ struggles as armed ones. Does the study you quote define the presence of riots as violence? I find that the data gets more murky and difficult to categorise when this is factored in…

The question of what defines a struggle as “nonviolent” is excellent, and we’ve wrestled with it quite a lot in building the Global Nonviolent Action Database. Many campaigns have riots associated with them, for example the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama civil rights campaign led by Fred Shuttlesworth and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a campaign most observers have no trouble designating as “nonviolent.”

Because it is a matter of degree, our researchers are given a set of criteria and we’ve had to leave out of the database some campaigns that I dearly would have wanted to include, for example the British women’s movement for woman suffrage. We’ve made our criteria transparent on the home page of the database: http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu. Press the button “About.” You’ll see when you search any given case that there is a field called “Campaigner violence” so the researcher can include any riots, fighting back with police, using weapons as a defensive threat, etc. We’re open to debate about any particular case, but wanted to be open about what puts a case “in” or “out.” The database is approaching six hundred cases, so we won’t be surprised if it stimulates a lot of debate!

Thanks George for your thoughtful and good strategic thinking about how to bring about radical and fundamental change in the US leading to a democratic and just society at peace with the world. My own feeling is that even throwing things at the police or smashing windows is counter-productive and rather than inviting more people into the movement, scares them away. I encourage those who want to throw things at the police and smash windows to outline their strategy for fundamental change in our society.

This piece prompted me to write an extended response, which is linked below.

In short, the nonviolence-diversity of tactics debate in Occupy is taking place WITHIN the “nonviolent”/”civil resistance” side of the data in Chenoweth and Stephan’s fascinating study. So bringing the two together serves to muddy the waters of both a bit.

I also have some thoughts about how Bolivia (in 1952 and 2005 in different ways) seems to meet the conditions you (Lakey) claim no violent revolution has met.

Further, many of the great lessons I’ve taken from the theory and practice of nonviolence can be applied to these civil resistance cases: organize better, bring people in, make them feel safe, learn to survive the force of your opponent, overcome fear, etc. Yet the Great Tactical Debate encourages people who use shields, throw back teargas canisters and roll dumpsters into the streets to be polarized against those who sit in and lock down. And to keep shouting with each other. I think possiblities waiting to be discovered together mean that we must change this conversation.

For some reason, Chenoweth’s and Stephan’s study has been widely misread and misrepresented in parts of the nonviolence community despite the clarity of the research.

As you point out, by the standards and definitions of Chenoweth and Stephan, Occupy IS a nonviolent resistance campaign. This is completely straightforward and obvious, and yet there continues to be a false dialectic between “violence” and “nonviolence” within a diminishing portion of the Movement as if there actually were a “violent resistance campaign” being advocated and engaged in through or by Occupy.

The matter was dealt with long ago. There is no “violent resistance campaign” advocated or engaged in by or through Occupy.

Addressing violent resistance campaigns (using Chenoweth/Stephan standards) as if Occupy has anything to do with them or were considering engaging in them is inappropriate — to be charitable about it.

I don’t see much evidence in Chenoweth and Stephan’s analysis of their research to claim that they would think that deliberate violent tactics, to which participants in most movements would resort, would not have a restrictive effect on a movement’s capacity to accomplish its goals, tactical or strategic.

In any case, Occupy is not the best case of civil resistance to examine in order to test that question. It’s by no means clear that Occupy is a coherent movement by any existing, commonly accepted definition. In the U.S., much less abroad, various local communities of activists adopted the Occupy brand, used the general assembly model of decision-making, and protested corporate and governmental policies that led to the economic crisis. But that does not mean that their actions were coordinated or intended to contribute to common goals embodying the changes they wanted to bring about. Only at the tactical level were their actions recognizable as civil resistance. But the apparent absence of any strategy to impose costs on the authorities or institutions they challenged, the absence of any systematic effort to mobilize fresh support across socioeconomic groups (truly the distinctive mark of any movement seeking national systemic change), and the absence of goals legible to the general public — which criteria were met by Arab Spring movements, the so-called “color revolutions”, and the 1980-1991 nonviolent movements for political change in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa — rendered Occupy, in comparison, as representing not much more than a loose association of local protest actions expressing discontent.

Yet even at this comparatively loose level of organization and shaped action, it is possible to notice how the use of violent tactics discredited Occupy activists who used them, inhibited broader participation, and even changed the media narrative from one of relative sympathy with their cause to that of “mayhem” in the streets. When movements are perceived as disciplined, focused and earnest, they grow. When they’re perceived as undisciplined and unfocused, they don’t.

If those who helped organize Occupy can regather the energy of activists while planning how to reorganize so as to develop those capacities of effective movements, there is no reason they cannot be successful in the future, but I seriously doubt that will happen if they tolerate the presence in their ranks of those who want to use a “diversity of tactics”.

The two best analytical books on how civil resistance can change nations are Kurt Schock’s “Unarmed Insurrections,” and Ackerman and Kreugler’s “Strategic Nonviolent Conflict.” The Chenoweth-Stephan book is terrific because it offers rich empirical data about resistance campaigns and movement. But those other two books provide both narrative and analytical assessments of successful (and unsuccessful) nation-changing movements. Both of them contain clear examples of the dampening effect on a movement’s effectiveness that even limited resort to violent or quasi-violent tactics can have, precisely because they make it difficult for movements to achieve unity, exhibit discipline and and show resilience of participation through the many setbacks that all movements experience.

Interesting perspective that the Occupy movement isn’t a “movement” — or much of anything else — at all. Is Occupy then just some random malcontents getting together to make mischief here and there? I suppose it is from some points of view. For there is considerable mischief (even Clown Police) and there are plenty of malcontents engaging in it.

At any rate, Occupy does not look anything like one of the Color Revolutions; it isn’t structured like one; and it doesn’t function like one. Could it be because its context is different?

Regardless, there is still no sign that Occupy is turning into or can turn into a violent resistance campaign according to the criteria of Chenoweth and Stephan among others.

While I agree with most of what you wrote, I have some issues with your use of my home country, Norway, and Sweden, as examples of succesful nonviolent revolutions.
We have actually never had a revolution, violent or nonviolent, since independence in 1905. Every government (except during Nazi occupation 1940-45) was replaced (or re-elected) through democratic elecitons every four years.
It is true that nonviolent activism has played an important role in some specific struggles during these years, in order to influence the decisions of the elected politicians, but we have never had a nonviolent revolution in Norway.

Therefore, please stop using us as an example of this.

Norway’s comparative success in creating an egalitarian society (although it is becoming less so under our current leftist government), is not due to revolutions, but due to a consensus-oriented political system where the Labour Party in the early twenties renounced violent revolution and favoured incremental political change and built alliances with other forces to achieve this. I think the best comparison today would be to say that they chose Lula’s appraoch over Chavez’ approach, and it proved to be a better approach then in Norway, as now in South America.

Terrible shame about the American Revolution, it has led us, to this moment, to yet another globe girdling empire, teetering on collapse. Its principles and Constitution rendered null and void by fear. A place where the original rebels would be themselves suspect of treason to the “state”.

I would like to direct all towards an excellent source for defining the authenticity of “revolutions” and “rebellions”. L’Homme Révolté (a.k.a. “The Rebel” 1951) by Albert Camus. Two brief excerpts on the topic being discussed here follows:

“…Authentic arts of rebellion will only consent to take up arms for institutions that limit violence, not for those which codify it. A revolution is not worth dying for unless it assures the immediate suppression of the death penalty; not worth going to prison for unless it refuses in advance to pass sentence without fixed terms. If rebel violence employs itself in the establishment of these institutions, announcing its aims as often as it can, it is the only way in which it can be really provisional. When the end is absolute, historically speaking, and when it is believed certain of realization, it is possible to go so far as to sacrifice others. When it is not, only oneself can be sacrificed, in the hazards of a struggle for the common dignity of man. Does the end justify the means? That is possible. But what will justify the end? To that question, which historical thought leaves pending, rebellion replies: the means…”

“…A revolutionary action which wishes to be coherent in terms of its origins should be embodied in an active consent to the relative. It would express fidelity to the human condition. Uncompromising as to its means, it would accept an approximation as far as its ends are concerned and, so that the approximation should become more and more accurately defined, it would allow absolute freedom of speech. Thus it would preserve the common existence that justifies its insurrection. In particular, it would preserve as an absolute law the permanent possibility of self-expression. This defines a particular line of conduct in regard to justice and freedom. There is no justice in society without natural or civil rights as its basis. There are no rights without expression of those rights. If the rights are expressed without hesitation it is more than probable that, sooner or later, the justice they postulate will come to the world. To conquer existence, we must start from the small amount of existence we find in ourselves and not deny it from/the very beginning. To silence the law until justice is established is to silence it forever since it will have no more occasion to speak if justice reigns forever. Once more, we thus confide justice into the keeping of those who alone have the ability to make themselves heard—those in power. For centuries, justice and existence as dispensed by those in power have been considered a favor. To kill freedom in order to establish the reign of justice comes to the same as resuscitating the idea of grace without divine intercession and of restoring by a mystifying reaction the mystic body in its basest elements. Even when justice is not realized, freedom preserves the power to protest and guarantees human communication…”

That Camus believed in 1951 that the end can sometimes justify the means, and that he would tolerate “limited” violence in an insurrection, is not an argument for the comparative effectuality for violence in a people’s movement today. The reason is that the global rise of nonviolent insurrections happened after he wrote that. For example, there were 50 successful nonviolent movements or coalitions in the 35 years between 1970 and 2005 which pushed their societies from authoritarian to democratic rule — but only 17 successful transitions where violence was present. http://www.icnl.org/research/journal/vol7iss3/special_3.htm

History has moved on. The effectuality of violence as a methodology of liberation is declining while that of nonviolent action is rising, in part because the arts of civil resistance are being far more widely learned and applied than ever before. We should be grateful that this is so, instead of being nostalgic for justifications of violence that were offered before this became to be so.

Your comment- “That Camus believed in 1951 that the end can sometimes justify the means, and that he would tolerate “limited” violence in an insurrection, is not an argument for the comparative effectuality for violence in a people’s movement today.”

Methinks you miss the point of the entire treatise, my friend.

“…It is then possible to say that rebellion, when it develops into destruction, is illogical. Claiming the unity of the human condition, it is a force of life, not of death. Its most profound logic is not the logic of destruction; it is the logic of creation. Its movement, in order to remain authentic, must never abandon any of the terms of the contradiction that sustains it. It must be faithful to the yes that it contains as well as to the no that nihilistic interpretations isolate in rebellion. The logic of the rebel is to want to serve justice so as not to add to the injustice of the human condition, to insist on plain language so as not to increase the universal falsehood, and to wager, in spite of human misery, for happiness. Nihilistic passion, adding to falsehood and injustice, destroys in its fury its original demands and thus deprives rebellion of its most cogent reasons. It kills in the fond conviction that this world is dedicated to death. The consequence of rebellion, on the contrary, is to refuse to legitimize murder because rebellion, in principle, is a protest against death…”

I think, as the Norwegian pointed out, you are misusing the term “revolution”. I think you set the bar pretty low for what is considered a revolution. Since your premise is faulty your conclusions are worthless. You are also not thinking big enough and you are not considering the very real “threat of force” posed by rebellious citizens or the looming threat of “humanitarian intervention” by the U.S. military. Another factor, is of course, political operations conducted by Western intelligence agencies. Furthermore, how do you define democracy? I think there are violent factions within some of your “nonviolent revolutions” that you are purposely overlooking. No country or region of the world operates in a vacuum. We won’t know how effective (or ineffective) purely nonviolent tactics are until the last superpower has been taken down.

This research contains both dubious definitions and a dubious methodology. I don’t know of any revolution that has succeeded by my standards. To respond to reductionism in kind, the study amounts to a political argument for nonviolence hiding behind a smokescreen of numbers and academic authority. Don’t believe the hype, folks.

I don’t know about the rest of the USA but up in Portland Oregon the Occupy wall street groups caused 1,000s of dollars worth of damage in a local park when allowed to camp out and blocked businesses.

Now police refuse to issue a permit for the group to camp at Mount Tabor and they (Occupy) are throwing a hissy fit at not being allowed to camp and stage their protest even though it’s clearly illegal to camp overnight in a public park in the first place.

And even if it weren’t illegal I don’t blame the permit being refused for the damages done where a lot of the people peed on the trails of the 1st park and wrecked park structures.

It is actually very scary now to go to the cities and we have stopped doing it unless we absolutely have to. At least they are not blocking freeways.

The *Tea baggers* as lame stream media calls them are not really a group but just average people wanting a simpler government and are generally non violent but the media focuses on the few that are to make all truth seekers look like nutcases.

I do not even know how I finished up right here, but I thought this submit
was once good. I don’t recognize who you might be but certainly you are going to a famous blogger in the event you are not already.

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